2025 Product PHOTOGRAPHY TREND PREDICTIONS
- Future Proof
- 2 days ago
- 5 min read
It’s that time of year again when the creative world turns its eyes to the future, trying to anticipate what will shape the visual landscape in 2026. For product photographers, staying ahead of the curve is more important than ever. Brands are competing for attention in a saturated market, audiences are becoming more visually fluent, and trends evolve faster than most can keep up.
But here’s the truth: being unique and standing out is only half the battle. The other half is understanding the trends shaping the industry—and learning how to interpret them your way. Following a trend doesn’t mean copying everyone else; it means showing your audience that you’re current, informed, and aware of the world around you. It’s about taking what’s popular and reshaping it so it aligns with your style, your voice, and your clients’ needs.
In this guide, we’re diving into the product photography trends that will define 2026. From emerging visual aesthetics to new technology-driven approaches, you’ll learn not just what’s coming—but how to make these trends work for you without blending into the crowd.
Let’s explore what the future looks like behind the lens.
1.Cloud dancer - pantone colour of the year
You might think it’s just a colour, but it reveals so much more about the world surrounding your subject. This shade is adaptable, clean, and minimal—creating the perfect canvas to let your product take center stage.
Starting on the right foot.
When Pop Days came to us for imagery to launch their new brand, we kept their bright, bold colours front of mind. By pairing them with an off-white backdrop, we were able to make everything pop (pun absolutely intended) letting the product speak for itself. Little did they know but they/we were ahead of the curve letting their product do the talking.
Simple and sophisticated.
The Organic Protein Co has also leaned into this soft background reflecting the tones of the protein powder. The off white background gives the product a high end feel letting the packaging to all the talking. Adding in colour and texture through props elevates the images.
2.flash photography
Flash photography is making a major comeback—not the soft, diffused studio style we’ve seen for years, but bold, direct, on-camera flash that embraces rawness and intensity. This aesthetic taps into the ongoing 90s and Y2K revival, bringing back the look of candid party snapshots, paparazzi imagery, and gritty nightlife scenes.
Out of the shadows.
It's all about a feeling and a mood created by JINJINs images. The hard flash not only shows off the bottle but gives a sense of nostalgia. This photo is right off a camera roll from a early 2000s dinner party and JINJINs front and center.
Bright and bold.
Hard lighting, bright subject, beautiful texture. No shadow in sight but still that same iconic flash style. The flash helps bring out the texture in the product and the interesting composition makes for a fun scroll stopping photo.
Creating hard shadows, bright subjects against darker surroundings, and a slightly “messy,” documentary feel that feels immediate and unfiltered. The result is high saturation, strong contrast, and an energy that prioritises personality over polish. It’s especially powerful in fashion, editorial, and portrait work, and it thrives in low-light environments where texture and contrast need to shine.
AI isn’t a visual style on its own, but it has become one of the biggest workflow trends shaping the aesthetics of product photography. Its rise is driven by faster, more accessible editing tools that make once-complex tasks almost instantaneous. AI retouching is becoming incredibly refined, allowing creators to clean up backgrounds, remove distractions, colour-grade, and build composites in seconds rather than hours.
Extend extend extend.
One way we’ve been using AI as a tool is to extend backgrounds. Tasks that would normally slow down the editing process are now much faster, helping to improve our overall workflow. One example of this is when posting our work to Instagram. Sometimes a client’s final image isn’t the correct aspect ratio for social media. By using generative fill, we’re still able to use the image, with AI matching colours, lighting, and textures so the scene looks natural and seamless.
It also enables artists to experiment with concepts, lighting setups, and scene designs before ever stepping into the studio, making pre-production more creative and efficient. While AI isn’t replacing photographers, it’s undeniably transforming how we plan, shoot, and polish our work.
4.Imperfection / “Perfectly Imperfect” Aesthetic
The “Perfectly Imperfect” aesthetic has emerged as one of the most significant cultural shifts in photography. Both creators and audiences are moving away from overly polished, edited images in favour of authenticity and relatability.
Crumbs and melted ice cream.
Some people may look at this image and think we forgot to tidy up. Others will take it as realness and the every day. As we move away from filters and striving for perfection. An images like this one for Yard Farm captures the everyday chaos in a studio setting.
The perfect drip.
The perfect stack if we do say so. The feeling it could topple over at any moment is strong. This makes for a scroll stopping image that feels like the perfect balance of polished and candid. This shoot for Chaos club truly embodied perfectly imperfect.
Imperfections—once considered mistakes—now convey trust, personality, and a sense of real life, making them especially powerful in lifestyle, fashion, documentary, and social media photography. This trend embraces grain, intentional blur or soft focus, light leaks, film-like colour shifts, awkward framing, unposed expressions, and candid moments, all of which celebrate the beauty of imperfection over staged perfection.
5. Retro Surrealism
Retro Surrealism is a visual style that mixes vintage aesthetics with dreamlike, uncanny elements—nostalgia with a twist of strangeness. Props play a central role in this trend, with old-school objects, furniture, fashion pieces, and interiors acting as anchors for surreal storytelling.
What you see is what you get.
As we move into the new year we plan to see a lot more analog ways of working in all areas. To counter the use of AI and digital manipulation we may see a rise in people creating the full image in the set up with minimal editing.
Glitter dream.
The return to old school props and feeling are also forecasted to make a big return. Whether it be a retro looking cake or an ornate plate anything is welcome to get that old school look. Nostalgia evokes emotion and what better way to make people connect with your brand then to get them to tug on their heart strings.
Think 60s–90s colour palettes, film grain, light leaks, and analog imperfections paired with props placed unexpectedly: oversized objects next to tiny figures, floating items, or everyday objects in strange combinations. These props, combined with unconventional lighting, distorted scale, and subtle collage-like layering, create a world that feels both familiar and uncanny. The result is imagery that uses tangible, retro items to ground viewers while simultaneously inviting them into a dreamlike, slightly eerie narrative.
These trends show that 2026 is about blending authenticity, creativity, and technology, while letting your personal vision shine. Whether you experiment with bold flash, hyper-realistic textures, AI-assisted workflows, or nostalgic surrealism, the key is to interpret trends in your own way, creating images that feel fresh, expressive, and unmistakably yours.
All images without a reference are our own.
Ready to Elevate Your Brand?
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